Email Marketing Gets New Persona With AI

Every few years the email marketing industry goes into defensive mode when it is suggested that email is dying, or becoming obsolete, or otherwise broken.

Inevitably it is argued that email should be, or will be, replaced with social media because the former is a static form of communication and it has been ruined by spam and phishing attempts.

Email marketing, in particular, is viewed as one-sided and prone to misinterpretation. Even when speaking generally about email, the medium can still drive people nuts, as comedic duo Trip and Tyler point out in this clip.

All that said, email and email marketing is still the best means of connecting with customers. The Direct Marketing Association, for example, has said that for every dollar invested in email marketing, $43 is generated.

Still, both the "email is dead" camp and the "email is used primarily by pompous and clueless dorks" narrative presented by T&T, make a valid point: Email marketing can stand some improvement.

One company's answers to some of these challenges is Conversica, a cloud-based AI platform that start a conversation with a prospective lead over email with the goal of eventually qualifying that lead so it can handed over to the sales team.

It gets this conversation going so by presenting the outbound message as written by an actual human. (Spoiler alert: It's not).

It's a neat trick and best of all, not only likely raise the ire of customers who might feel betrayed. The "deception" could be considered on par with the discovery that reality TV shows are, shall we say, staged.

This is how it works:

A prospect visits a company's site and downloads a white paper, say, or otherwise makes a request using his email address.

Maybe about 15 or 30 minutes later (not immediately as the company dubs that "too creepy") this person receives an email from a sales assistant named Sarah. Or Jane or Becky. In reality, it is, of course, the Conversica platform, which has sent the prospect an email from the "sales assistant".

The email addresses the recipient by name, let's call him Pat, and it -- I mean, she -- writes:

Hi Pat,

I saw you were on our website and downloaded our white paper. Did you find everything you were looking for? Please contact me if you have any questions.

A few days later, Sarah reaches out to Pat again. Then again, and again and again, with slightly different messages, but always from the solicitous Sarah.

Somewhere between the fifth and 12th email, Pat finally responds. Surprisingly, to us humans at least, he is not annoyed.

At least he's not according to Conversica's CMO Carl Landers, who says the company has experimented and tested the number of non-sales inquiries that can be sent without pushing a prospect over the edge -- providing, of course, there is an unsubscribe button prominently displayed.

"We have seen this repeatedly with the responses we get," he tells me. "People are happy to have been reminded about something they put on the back burner, or maybe they were out of town. These aren't exactly high-priority messages requiring an immediate response so people tend to forget the first few that are sent."

The fact that the emails have been sent by "Sarah" also helped, Landers says.

He says the company gets an astounding 50% response rate to such an outbound campaign. That compares with the 10% response rate auto-generated emails typically get.

Of course, because people think they are talking with a human they tend to send back all manner of responses, such as "I am not interested in this product but my boss might be. Here is her email address." Or, "I am interested but can you tell me when the product delivery date is?" Or, "Does it come in black?" The artificial intelligence can field all these queries still in the Sarah persona, Landers says.

Sarah also can handle the dead silence that unnerves most human reps. "I think most reps give up after a few attempts, especially when cold calling, because they don’t want to be annoying," Landers says. "That is the beauty of AI. Everything it does is based on algorithms and the knowledge that responses can take a lot longer than one or two tries."

The platform then completes the loop by sending the qualified lead -- in this case, Pat, who turns out to be very interested in learning more about the product -- to the sales department. Or as Sarah tells Pat, "Great! I am sending you to Bill in our sales department. He can help you further."

To be sure, no one will claim that adding to human touch, so to speak, to this particular piece of the email marketing chain of events will solve all of its challenges. The medium could stand to be better integrated with the rest of a CRM application, for instance. List and data quality is a perennial worry and let's not even begin to discuss the aforementioned phishing and spam scourge.

But the technology is moving forward and the industry can always indulge in a bit of schadenfreude as it waits for other advances to be made. After all, there are plenty of other productivity office apps that are equally as cumbersome.

Trip and Tyler, take it away.

I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years writing about business one way or another. Everything I‘ve learned in all this time can be boiled down to one truth: finance, transportation, marketing, supply chain - no matter what the original subject is all roads lead back to...